A Sporting Chance 3

We fear that our occasional posts on asylum-inspired sports and pastimes have yet to attract the interest of the International Olympic Committee. There will be no billiards and no baseball at London 2012. Undeterred, we persevere with our suggestions, and this month highlight an Olympic sport discontinued after the 1900 Games. Croquet was a popular pursuit at Bethlem Hospital in the Victorian and Edwardian eras and beyond (as evidenced by the photograph that accompanies this post). In a novel based on her experience as a patient in the 1920s, Antonia White relates a moment of fearful insight precipitated by a match played in the company of strangers with little regard to the rules:

‘In vain Clara tried to explain the rules of croquet…But it was hopeless. No-one could understand. In the end she left them running gaily about the lawn, hitting any ball they saw and usually all playing at once…the next moment, it came to her. These women were mad. All the women she saw at mealtimes were mad. No wonder she could make no contact with them. She was imprisoned in a place full of mad people.’¹

Taken in isolation, and with too much seriousness, a quotation like this one might seem to support a stigmatising dichotomy between ‘them’ and ‘us’, the mad and the sane, as well as an unsupportable shortcut in mental diagnostics whereby disregard of sporting rules was a positive indicator of insanity. Yet what we have in Clara is not an omniscient, inerrant narrator, but a character whose grasp of the rules of croquet may have been impeccable but whose purchase on her own memories and perceptions sometimes proved faulty.

¹ Antonia White, Beyond the Glass (London, 1979), p. 243.

A Sporting Chance 1

Sport and other pastimes formed an important part of the therapeutic efforts of psychiatric hospitals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In a short series of posts, of which this is the first, we make none-too-serious suggestions for new Olympic sports, inspired by hospital-organised recreation at Bethlem and elsewhere.

In 1878, Edward Walford observes that “on the men’s side” of Bethlem there “is a billiard-room, to which the most hopeful cases among the male patients have access under certain restrictions. This is a large apartment, which, but for its furniture, would look like an immense and lofty green-house, since it is almost entirely glazed above the height of about six feet—a plan which ensures a capital light upon the table. Around the room are raised cushioned seats for those who desire to watch the play; while nearer the fire a large study-table is filled with magazines, journals, and general literature.”¹

Walford’s implication that billiards was a male-only pursuit is misleading; photographs held at the Archives & Museum show billiard tables on both men’s and women’s wards. Nor was the game the sole province of Bethlem’s patients. Recalling his medical student days, the psychiatrist and pioneer anthropologist W.H.R. Rivers wrote in his book Conflict and Dream (1923) that “Dr [Maurice] Craig and I [were] residents together at Bethlem Hospital many years ago, where we had frequently played billiards, and as he was by far the better player, I…learned much from him.”²

Is it too much to hope that a few civilised games of billiards will feature in the London 2012 Games?

¹ Edward Walford , ‘St George’s Fields’, Old and New London: Volume 6 (1878).

² W.H.R. Rivers, Conflict and Dream (1923), p. 43.